Launched last year, the London Contemporary Music festival is the latest addition to the capital's new-music scene. There's a rough-edged sense of eclecticism about it, and a first impression suggests it might well become the 21st-century replacement for the much missed Almeida festival, which introduced so many composers to this country during the 1980s.

What LCMF lacks so far is a permanent venue, and this year's six days of concerts took place in Second Home, just off the East End's Brick Lane, which is due to become a creative business centre later this year. The performing space was bounded by the mirrors of Michelangelo Pistoletto's Ten Less One, whose destruction was designed as the smashing climax of the week.

Programmes have ranged across the musical spectrum, from critiques of capitalism and British 1970s experimentalism to Noh theatre and electroacoustic sets, while the final event included two UK premieres from one of Europe's leading living composers, Salvatore Sciarrino. The Quartetto Prometeo, regular Sciarrino collaborators, brought his Seventh and Ninth Quartets to the UK for the first time, and pianist Mark Knoop played his imposing, increasingly confrontational Fifth Piano Sonata, interspersing the Sciarrino with slightly indulgent performances of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas.

It was a cleverly conceived programme, and despite all the reflective surfaces and swaths of unadorned concrete, the acoustics seemed remarkably good; the Prometeo made sure the crying, whispering soundscapes of Sciarrino's quartets were never lost. The two quartets were sharply contrasted: the Seventh, from 1999, a compact single span, and the Ninth, completed two years ago, cast a more expansive pair of movements, which begins with frozen, glassy chords before moving into a more animated world of swoops and sighs. The connection with Sciarrino's stage works is hard to miss: this is abstract drama, as potent in its own way as any of his music-theatre pieces.